‘Being Human’: Lil’ Smokie

[This is a review of Being Human season 4, episode 3. There will be SPOILERS.]

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This week’s episode of Being Human finally paid off on the tease from the end of the season premiere episode where we saw that Kenny had miraculously returned from the wilderness without deformity to take control of the Boston vampire machine with Blake as his sidekick.

While Aidan and Kenny’s interactions – a little kidnap confusion, a grand effort to impress Aidan, a bit of rejection, and an attempt by Kenny to kill Josh – seemed to point to a long and drawn out battle between the two, they mostly proved to be a red herring.

Instead of – once again – putting Aidan in a position to reject the vampire authority in pursuit of his freedom, Aidan and Kenny were quickly united by an attack on their kind right after Kenny revealed that he was not actually healed, but rather that he had gained the ability to compel vampires (and others) into seeing what he wanted them to see.

Will that parlor trick come in handy in the future? Most likely, but it seems pretty likely that Aidan really did see Suzanna (Aidan’s wife) in Blade mode, wielding a sword and a stake while clearing out Kenny’s vamp blood den. The question is: Why? Is this in response to her guilt? Is she avenging Bishop’s death? Is she after Aidan? Hopefully, we’ll get a bit more insight next week.

It’s worth noting that, while Kenny may not easily slot in as a villain this season, he now seems to have a much firmer place on the show. Clearly, he and Aidan have father/son issues to work through, and the flashback to Kenny’s pre-turn days and Aidan’s warning to Kenny to pull his hands back from a felled vamp before she turns to dust seem to indicate that Aidan still has feelings for the teen vamp king, even if he did try to kill Josh.

Speaking of Josh, while it was nice to get a brief glimpse of the characters lightness as he and Aidan went meta to discuss how they still have jobs despite all of the time that they have missed from work, we really didn’t get much of a chance to get comfortable and neither did Nora, who risked Josh’s life to grasp at a kind of normalcy that she is still chasing.

Despite the end of the untenable one night of human-Josh situation, Nora realizes that it didn’t exactly take, confiding to Sally that she still sees the wolf in Josh, something that he is desperate (but, at times, unable) to tamp down.

At work, Josh’s urges come to the fore, but when he is confronted by two vampire flunkies (thanks Kenny), the wolf nearly comes all the way back, an impossibility according to Aidan, which means that Sally’s spell essentially turned Josh into a hybrid, unbeknownst to her.

It always seems like Sally’s motives are noble. She saved Josh in last week’s episode, healed Nora’s stomach this time out, and she was willing to sacrifice everything to save her brother last season. Intent matters very little, though, and Sally’s first dalliance with magic in this episode resulted in the return of Donna, who wormed her way up from purgatory by tricking Sally into thinking that she could conjure her door once again, giving Sally a chance to leave.

Why Sally would trust that any slice of the afterlife would be welcoming to her after her constant willingness to cheat death and the great beyond is unknown, but maybe she’s just desperate to escape the fate that Donna keeps forecasting for her.

In the season premiere, Sally time-jumped back to a troubling ceremony where a little girl was being tortured. Last week saw a more innocent trip back, right to the first day when Aidan and Josh moved into the house. But this week those two concepts merged as Sally found herself in the house during a party in the 1970s.

The catch? The same little girl from the premiere is seen walking around passing out appetizers, and later, she reaches out to Sally in the present, pushing her to believe that the these jumps aren’t a punishment, but that they are offering her a chance to save this mysterious girl.

Despite all of these big developments, Nora’s plight continues to be the most compelling reason to watch Being Human as she continues to be the one character that really grounds the show, serving as the most relatable character and unfortunately the one that is most likely to be harmed by the supernatural swirl that consumes that house and these lives.

While we’ve seen Josh wrestle with his inner urges before, Nora has never seemed more at the end of her rope. Still, it was Nora who stood strongest, talking Josh off a metaphorical cliff by episode’s end, though we have to wonder if she was really able to get through to him or if her ache to be a “happy married couple” will continue as Josh continues to grow more distant and Aidan and Sally become more consumed with their own issues.